Tag Archives: Warpaint

This week, I decided to go for another often covered song from Duran’s catalog – The Chauffeur. If you haven’t checked out Warpaint’s cover from the Manimal-curated soon-to-be-released album titled Making Patterns Rhyme yet, go here!

The Chauffeur is obviously a fan favorite, and as such, I think it’s tough for fans to find a cover of this that they really can approve of. Again, I still think it has everything to do with some misaligned band loyalty than it does the songs themselves, so I’m going to keep working at this until we find songs that people like! Expose your ears to something new – it’s good for you, it’s good for your brain, and it’s good for your spirit! (Really, there was a recent study done that concluded hearing new music is really good for your brain – it helps your brain stay young. We all need that!!)

Just as I did last week, I went to YouTube to find some covers. Some are well-recognized, others are more obscure. Take a listen and see what you think. My short review is under each link!

This cover remains very faithful to the original, which leaves me wondering what else they could have done with it to make it their own. There’s a lot of echo and reverb in parts of this, which makes the song feel dreamy and existential. Overall it’s a good, solid effort to pay homage to the original.

This one draws me in immediately because I like the hard edge of the guitar. The vocals are incredibly similar to Simon’s, and they have the same type of effect on them that the original has. I do like the way they have turned up the guitar here, although I think it might have the tendency to drown out the vocals.

I found this cover on YouTube and it was one I hadn’t heard before. This one uses a slightly quicker tempo and synth loops that are a little more like bells than the original. It’s pretty faithful to the original in spirit, even though it does not use the same musical arrangement and feels a little “thin” until 2/3 of the way through the song when the drums pick up.

This is a Finnish band and the cover is ever-so-slightly different in parts. The vocals are drawn out (and changed) in parts, and the music really worried me at first because I couldn’t tell where they were really headed musically, and that goes on throughout the song in between verses. It goes from being very faithful (albeit they use a much fuller musical arrangement that sort of topples over into “soft rock”) to being something, well…we’ll just say very different. The things they change are very creative, even though I really don’t think they work for the song. The music changes the spirit of the song, and if nothing else, it’s very interesting to hear how changing the arrangement as well as a few lines of vocals and how they are sung really makes the song reflect differently on the listener.

I’d be into this more if I didn’t hear his mistakes…but this is live, and I’ll give the guy credit for playing it at all. Other than that, the cover is very faithful to the original, although it’s done on piano and I especially like what he did with the mid-section.

I was underwhelmed with this local Chicago band’s version until they got to the mid-section where they dared to turn up the guitar and let her go. The tempo is upbeat (I think it should not have been because it loses effect that way), but the guitar adds a really nice texture to the smoothness of the vocals. For the guitar solo, they dared to go on step further and blend a bit from Kashmir by Led Zeppelin into the song. Surprisingly, it’s kind of cool and works with this harder-edged cover.

I can’t say I love this one. It takes forever to get going and once it does – you’d think you were in the races to the finish. They speed this up way fast, and it loses the original effect with nothing done to try and change the song. Then they put this electronica section in after the first chorus. I applaud their effort, but it’s not a favorite.

I am happy to include one version by a female. I have to say though, that for me – while this cover is beautiful and it’s clear she is a well-trained vocalist, I think it loses something (for me) when sung by a female. It’s otherwise very similar to the original with nothing really changed, but somehow just having a woman sing turns the whole song completely on it’s head and makes it something completely different.

There’s eight versions for you. Truthfully, none of them really push the envelope and stray too far from the original…but that’s OK. Check them out, see what you think – comment back with your favorite, or if you’ve got others for me to post I’m happy to do that too!

I love the days when Manimal releases a new song from the Making Patterns Rhyme album, because it’s like getting brand new music! Today is certainly no exception. I suspect that many fans will find this new single easy on the palate, and perhaps even something that they’ll add to their playlists.

When I first hit ‘play’, I won’t lie – at first I found myself the teensiest bit underwhelmed. It’s not that the song isn’t beautiful or that the vocals left me cold. I liked the sound, but I felt like they could have pushed that envelope a bit further. It sounded too much like what Duran Duran had done. I wanted more. I wanted to hear what Warpaint could really do with it on their own.

At this point – I might have shut the song off to write a short blog because I thought I’d gotten a good idea of what they’d done. This time though, I left the song playing as I went on to tackle the next morning task on my list. I’m glad I did, because as they say – “the best was yet to come”. The further it got into the song, the more that Warpaint played with the melody – not taking away from the original, but adding more to the sound. The vocals grew more haunting, more ethereal; the music more deconstructed, so to speak. They explored the sounds in a way that Duran Duran hadn’t, and I loved it! The last 30 seconds or so of the song are worth waiting for – and you’ll want to play the song over and over again because it really is that good. They took the beauty of the original and added their own color to the artistic palate. Rather than just being comfortable with letting the original melody stand on it’s own, they explored a bit with the sound combinations, and in many ways – Warpaint improved upon the original. I suspect this one sentence may get me into trouble with my fellow Duranies, but it’s the truth – and it pays the highest compliment possible to Duran Duran.

Additionally, I’m taking a second to gush over the artwork that our very own Patty Palazzo has created for the project. In each case, she has taken an image from the original song (most from videos, with the obvious exceptions of the songs that did not have videos) and updated it as the artwork for the cover version. It’s kind of like taking a bit of the old to send off the new, and I love that simple, yet effective theme. I really like the specific images Patty has chosen – they ‘re iconic for us, and explanative of the cover version as well.

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